What if Apple Stayed with IBM ??

macrumors 68000

What do you think the consequences would have been if Apple had decided to stay with IBM - particularly for the laptops? A year, 18 months, 2 years down the line and still no real solution to really bumping up the speed and competeing with PC's. It's scary just thinking about it. However, now they have an alternative solution, I'm really excited about what Apple has in store for us in that time frame.

macrumors 601

What do you think the consequences would have been if Apple had decided to stay with IBM - particularly for the laptops? A year, 18 months, 2 years down the line and still no real solution to really bumping up the speed and competeing with PC's. It's scary just thinking about it. However, now they have an alternative solution, I'm really excited about what Apple has in store for us in that time frame.

Oh and by the way, i'm still switching to a Mac sometime this year.

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Looking at the some article that came out over the weekend, laptop sales beat desktop sales for the first time ever. My opinion is that Apple's move to Intel really isn't a vote of no confidence to the G5, rather a statement on the state of the G4 (and future variants).

Apple can't continue to lose sales on Powerbooks and iBooks to Centrino laptops because Freescale can't/won't get the G4 to go any faster. The e600 and e700 chips sounded promising for future PBs and iBs, but I guess Apple didn't see a future there. They would have obviously been playing with e600 prototypes and maybe they didn't like what they saw.

The Pentium M is up over 2ghz now with better battery life and much better performance compared to the G4. I feel that Apple made this move to prevent the laptops from becoming irrelevant.

macrumors member

You know, I think Apple would've been just fine. G5 speed would slowely increase. Maybe in a year PB G5. In the mean time bumped G4's. IBM wasn't the only one to hit a wall with clockspeed. Intel cancelled their 4Ghz Pentium 4. Freescale could've provided a dual core G4 for the powerbooks maybe.

macrumors 65816

I think that if Apple thought IMB/Freescale could deliver, they would have stayed with them...they probably know things we don't. I think overall its a good move. Macs will still be Macs and Windows/PCs will still be crap (for the type of stuff I use a computer for.)

macrumors 6502

You know, I think Apple would've been just fine. G5 speed would slowely increase. Maybe in a year PB G5. In the mean time bumped G4's. IBM wasn't the only one to hit a wall with clockspeed. Intel cancelled their 4Ghz Pentium 4. Freescale could've provided a dual core G4 for the powerbooks maybe.

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There is no basis to that reasoning though. You can't just say Apple would've been fine in another year without facts to base it on. What tells you they would've been fine? If you use *recent history* as your guide, it's easy to see that progress has been SLOW. We've only gone up a *tiny* bit in speeds and the PM updates have been disappointing TWICE. You can't just say another year would've made everything great. Time isn't the answer. Better progress by the chip company is the answer.

macrumors 6502a

I think the slide Steve showed of performance per watt tells it all (or
at least most of it). Laptops have become the majority of the computer
market and Intel had PowerPC beat by 70 vs 15 performance units
per watt (AFAIR).

If IBM/Freescale couldn't convince him of their roadmap then going to
Intel was the only decision that could be made.

macrumors 6502

macrumors G5

Apple would probably be forced to cough up $100-250 million to both Freescale and IBM to put the dual core G4 and the Power5-UL into production.

It's not that Freescale and IBM cannot do it, it's that Apple is being forced to pay them to do it -- or wait while they diddle around for a year or two.

Or the test runs of both of these failed CPUs to live up to expectations, which happens when IBM goes from "lab" to pre-production units.

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And in two-three years Apple would be back in the same position when IBM/Freescale are talking about the next big thing available for PowerPC -- but Apple won't be getting it without sliding some cash under the table.

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It was bound to happen, but nobody expected Apple to take the risk of making the switch happen the way it did.

But the future timing of this does slot in well with a "good time to do it" -- I would have expected Apple to do the biggies behind closed doors, and give the rest of the developers short notice of the major change.

The way they did it was shocking and a potential marketing problem for current PPC computers.

macrumors 68020

IBM should've stayed with pushing the edge and not gone into a gaming enviroment (xBox, PS3 wars). I know there are many areas a company can go and does but it's sad to see a bigger push for the gaming market ( I have both units for games so please no flames) since now would be a great time for any chip maker to really advance and as to say make the others follow

macrumors 601

well i am going to guess that IBM will make a bit more money off of MS, Sony, and of course Nintendo (why does everyone forget the best gaming console???) anywho, yeah i think they make more sales on those three consoles combined than they would have been with Apple computer chips. So IBM probably partly didn't want apple anymore, so that it could free up production labs for the consoles

macrumors member

There is no basis to that reasoning though. You can't just say Apple would've been fine in another year without facts to base it on. What tells you they would've been fine? If you use *recent history* as your guide, it's easy to see that progress has been SLOW. We've only gone up a *tiny* bit in speeds and the PM updates have been disappointing TWICE. You can't just say another year would've made everything great. Time isn't the answer. Better progress by the chip company is the answer.

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It has been just the same in recent history with Intel. As I said Intel had a 4Ghz P4 planned for 2004 and they had to cancel it. They're having trouble getting clockspeeds up just like everyone else. I believe freescale have dual core G4's in the pipeline so that would handle the falling behind in laptops. And macs are not behind at all in the desktop.

macrumors 65816

What do you think the consequences would have been if Apple had decided to stay with IBM - particularly for the laptops? A year, 18 months, 2 years down the line and still no real solution to really bumping up the speed and competeing with PC's. It's scary just thinking about it. However, now they have an alternative solution, I'm really excited about what Apple has in store for us in that time frame.

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